Faces for a Philosophy of the Morning

Abstract

And when morning appeared, (he) found himself in thick forest and the road disappeared. Then he laid the dead man in a hollow tree at his head-for he wanted to protect him from the wolves-and laid himself down on the mossy ground.l How many of us, in our philosophical writings, include burying a corpse with our own hands? Which of us dare publish an article containing conversations with animals, friendships with beggars or circus performers, or dialogues with our own shadows? In the theoretical reflections on otherness, do any of us risk including sundry face-to-face encounters with strangers? Readers of Nietzsche likely believe they have the answer to the above questions. Only the writer of Zarathustra seems willing to interweave his philosophical thoughts with meeting a dwarf, a high-wire walker, or a serpent. In his solitary wanderings Nietzsche stuns and delights the reader by treating unfamiliar encounters as integral to his thinking about familiar ideas and values. Yet readers of Alphonso Lingis's recent works might understandably suggest a new response to the above questions. Wandering from the Americas to Asia, Lingis retells encounters with transvestites, body-builders, dope dealers, and prisoners that are central to discussions of more conventional appeal, such as truth and beauty. Like Nietzsche, and partly because of Nietzsche, Lingis interweaves acts of philosophy with the ventures of a wanderer. These philosophical sojourns contribute to and challenge much of the recent discussion on otherness. However well intentioned, many disputes on the other are guided by cultural, political, or personal convictions and commitments. Such guides have the inadvertent effect of situating an encounter with the other on familiar grounds, thus precluding the possibility of knowing the other in his or her distinctness, on his or her own terms. Are not many of the disputes about otherness simply new ways of ignoring the realities of others? Perhaps many of the current discussions on otherness are too confident in their moral or political values, values that might not stand up to scrutiny if the inquiry into otherness were guided by a wanderer's will to truth. In the following pages I want to elucidate several key aspects of the wanderer's will to truth. Part one addresses what a philosopher can gain from encounters with others in strange circumstances, those outside more familiar routes of scholarship or introspection. Part two focuses on specific issues in facing the other, including anonymity and identity, silence and trust, law and chance. Part three briefly concludes with what the reader might gain from a who returns to town. Each part will open with a selection from Nietzsche as a point of departure. If Lingis is a disciple of Nietzsche, it is only in the sense Nietzsche demanded: Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves.... One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.2 In leaving Nietzsche Lingis takes his readers to different ways of encountering others. Whereas Nietzsche lets Zarathustra partly play the role of the prophet, Lingis is rooted in phenomenology. Nietzsche speaks with voices of the past and anticipates figures of the future. In teaching the Ubermensch (Overman, or Superman), he enlists the images of height and depth, overcoming and descending. Lingis prefers turning to the faces of humans who still populate this earth. However divergent their paths, the wanderers return to the reader and encourage the rethinking of human possibilities and familiar truths. I. Leaving Town The wanderer speaks.-If you would like to see our European morality for once as it looks from a distance, and if one would like to measure it again other moralities, past and future, then one has to proceed like a who wants to know how high the towers in town are: he leaves the town.... That one wants to go precisely out there, up there, may be a minor madness, a peculiar `you must'-for we seekers for knowledge also have our idiosyncrasies of `unfree will---The question is whether one really can get up there. …